


Paper Crown Kings

by Fireblasts



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: 85-percenter, M/M, Pining, the truth is out there somewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 02:13:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1411171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireblasts/pseuds/Fireblasts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jonathan and Patrick and their showdown in the villa of the tiny island that Patrick gets to own for weeks at a time, just because.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper Crown Kings

**Author's Note:**

> A tentative subtitle for this would be "A Thing I Wrote (mostly) Over A Few Different Plane Rides During Spring Break," so apologies for un-beta'd typos and the sense I get that this thing is more like 85% complete rather than actually done. This is not a work to be taken too seriously, regardless of how seriously Johnny seems to take Patrick's actions in this. 
> 
> Minor content warnings for dubious first base consent (Johnny kisses Patrick unexpectedly twice) and a brief mention of a potential drowning of a side character (which doesn't actually occur).
> 
> EDIT: this turned out to be more of a stylistic and tonal experiment than I expected. Probably not the best format for that, but whatever. Sorry if you feel like you don't come away from this story with anything of significance! It's all good.

“Who the fuck gave _you_ an island?” is an appropriate response on Jonathan’s part to Patrick’s “I’ve got an island, you know,” which was also an appropriate if unexpected response to Jonathan’s inquiry of what Patrick was going to do for the summer now that they’ve been shoved out of the playoffs.

“It’s, like, a timeshare,” Patrick explains. “Well, it is a timeshare. But I get to use it for longer than usual because the villa’s the only property on the entire island. So you own the whole island.”

“Let me guess,” Johnny’s unimpressed. “It’s somewhere Baltic? You gonna hang out with the Swedes?”

“It’s off the coast of Florida, actually,” Patrick’s not really feeling how indifferent Johnny is about his island. It’s an island and he owns it (kind of). That’s totally rad. Gotta kick this conversation into high gear. “There are a bunch of other islands near it, ones that aren’t timeshares. The rich folk who live on the coast and have boats can picnic on them if they want.”

Still low gear, but Johnny doesn’t say anything about Patrick having a need for a tie-in to civilization, and knowing Mr. I’ll-Ice-Fish-By-Myself-Forever, that’s a start. He feels like he’s out of park, or that he’s at least taken the handbrake off.

“You wanna come with me?” Patrick asks, because showing Johnny the island is probably the best way to get him to appreciate it. “Spend a week hanging out with me to cool your heels from the playoffs before you go moping off to Winnipeg?”

“I don’t mope,” Johnny says, frowning. “I try to think about how we can be better next year. It’s what all of us should be doing.”

“You know they won’t be,” Patrick says, which earns him a nod from Johnny. “Come on, I promise it’ll be a good time.”

Johnny looks unconvinced, which is how he ends up listening to Kaner backpedal a few times to restart his argument about how great his island is, and after enough time and enough thought on the matter of him and Kaner, _alone_ , on a literally deserted island with enough communication with the mainland to not set his hair on edge, Johnny concedes.

And then finds himself frowning a few days later, rowing a boat—a fucking _dinghy_ —that conveniently only has one set of oars (and Kaner needs to “navigate” or whatever so they can’t take turns) for fifteen minutes during an afternoon sunshower that lasts just as long and probably sets the mood for the entire engagement.

/

**Monday**

“Put a fucking smile on your face,” Patrick groans as he hops ashore, having dutifully noticed Johnny’s scowl ten minutes after it first planted itself on his face. “We’re going to live the good life! This is the Tropic of Cancer, not the Tropic of Can’t-cer.”

Johnny’s too busy remembering a book he read once, in which an orange that grew on the Tropic of Cancer is brought to Los Angeles and completely dislodges the city from the rest of the world, and wondering if he’s going to share that same fate, to tell Patrick how fucking awful that joke was.

“We’re going to be here a week,” he says instead.

“ _You’re_ going to be here a week,” Patrick corrects. “I could spend the rest of my life here.”

“You wouldn’t,” Johnny doesn’t bother pretending he doesn’t sound hurt. Playing without Patrick would be painful. “You can’t. You’re contractually obligated to return to the Blackhawks next season.”

“I’ll rescind it, retire out of the blue,” Patrick lilts, the sunshine striking him in ways that it shouldn’t. Johnny lets the shudder run through his spine. “You okay?”

“Good,” he promises, shielding his eyes from the sun as an excuse to not have to look at Patrick.

“Good,” Patrick echoes, keeping his eyes on Johnny for a moment. He tries to breathe in as much salt as he can and forget they’re just a few miles from the mainland. You can still see it from the shore is the problem, so he spins around, faces the villa. “Welcome to the Château de Va-Kane-tion.”

Johnny doesn’t let that one slide. “You’re fucking awful. I’m gonna take this dinghy back to shore and ditch you for the week if you keep this up.”

Patrick doesn’t bother to turn back to Johnny to rebuff him, just bends to pick up his duffle bag and pulls the keys from his pocket. Johnny’s got no choice but to tie the dinghy to the dock himself before grabbing his own bag and ditching the sand for the unruly grasses of the villa’s yard.

“When do you think this place was last used?” Johnny asks, noting a thin layer of dust on everything when Patrick switches on a lamp in the hallway.

Patrick shrugs. “Winter probably? The lady I spoke with on the phone seemed surprised that I was interested in actually visiting.”

Johnny admires Patrick admiring himself in a full-body mirror that somehow doesn’t seem out of place in the hallway, like it was destined for this moment of mental perversity. “You bought this place while drunk, didn’t you?”

“I’m pretty sure I met the guy who pawned off his share of this on me at a bar, yeah,” Patrick confesses. Johnny looks disappointed by the admission. “What? We’re not all frugal drunks. Don’t ruin this vacation for me by being your usual bitter self.”

Johnny finds another hallway to fake interest in while Patrick moves to the living room, hauling both of their bags through. He doesn’t remember when he gave Patrick his duffle bag, but maybe he set it down and Patrick just thoughtfully picked it back up, everyday items passing between them like pucks usually did, playoffs run cut short but still running through their minds.

There’s a painting of a very young version of the current Queen of England, barely dressed, adorned on the wall of the hallway he slides down, and after a moment too long of staring at it and trying to piece together why there’s a scrawl on the paper below the painting stating that this is a picture of Catherine the Great when it _clearly_ isn’t, he ducks back into the living room.

“This place has character,” he tries, knowing ‘character’ is one of the words you use to describe a house with nothing of the sort.

“Shut up,” Patrick says, not as oblivious to euphemism as Johnny would’ve expected. “This is my island; the only character it needs is me.”

“You brought me along anyway,” Johnny says, maybe seeking clarification.

Patrick doesn’t supply any, just turns a bright smile toward him and nods.

“Cool.” Johnny picks up his bag because his hands feel empty and awkward without conversation to cling to.

Luckily, Patrick catches on. “Oh, right. Let me, uh,” he fishes in his pockets for something and pulls out a wad of paper. Johnny’s guessing it’s some sort of information packet on the house, with a map in the back, until Patrick starts unfolding it wider and wider until the point that Johnny realizes he’s been carting around the villa’s entire blueprint in his back pocket.

Patrick gestures for him to come over and examine the unwieldy paper, and Johnny ends up having to hold one side of it because Patrick has an urge to point all over the damn thing. “So there are four bedrooms,” he taps each of them on the blueprint, as if Johnny couldn’t see them. Only two of the bedrooms are anywhere near each other, and Patrick presses his fingers into their spots on the paper with so much force that he knocks it out of his own hand and Johnny lets it fall to the floor.

“You wanna—?” Johnny starts.

“Yeah, there,” Patrick confirms. “That work for you? It’d be a shame to waste all the space in the bedrooms if we shared.”

It’s (kind of) Patrick’s island, so Patrick gets what he wants, Johnny supposes. Not sharing bedrooms during the summer doesn’t bother him as much as not sharing them during the season would, since he spends most of March and April preparing himself for it. It’s not a ritual he’s proud of, but whatever.

“Works fine,” he nods, and then they have to pick the blueprint back off the ground and sort out where the entrance is—they lay it out on a coffee table and Johnny draws his own variation of a map of the house, just in case—so they can figure out where they are in relation to the rooms they’ve decided to claim. Not that there’s anyone to claim them against. (To be fair, Johnny’s more than pleased that this trip is something staying between the two of them.)

They pass the kitchen on their way to the rooms, which is important if only because they forgot to note its location on the blueprint before moving on and it’s close enough to sunset for them to start getting hungry. Johnny’s almost overcome by emotion when they move through the kitchen and the most beautiful coffeemaker he’s ever seen is already plugged into the wall, set up by some ghost who’s finally using their powers for good.

“You’re being overdramatic,” Patrick laughs, urging Johnny along.

“At least some portion of my week here will be bearable,” Johnny gripes, earning him some form of an unimpressed glare from Patrick.

The rooms lack all sort of aesthetic appeal except sterility, given the white walls and lack of adornments (not even any paintings of nude Queens disguised as other royalty), but that works fine for Johnny. Patrick shows a brief amount of disgust in his room, but shakes it off by the time he’s guided Johnny into his, next door.

Next door as in, like, their beds are up against the same wall. They could probably talk to each other at night if they didn’t whisper. “You want me to help you move that?” Patrick asks, maybe worried that Johnny wouldn’t want to be so close to him. But that’s garbage, so Johnny shakes his head. Patrick shrugs, but nods, and then, “Okay, but if I hear you snore through the wall, I’m banging on it to wake you up.”

“Fair enough,” Johnny says, kicking his bag across the floor so that it slides next to his bed. Patrick looks at him like he’s watching him just because he wants to, and Johnny catches it last-moment, when Patrick’s already turning his head to look at the window and deciding that he needs to open those blinds for Johnny.

“Here, sunlight,” he promises, but what filters through the blinds when he spins them open is just the last of what the sun brought. Patrick stands still in front of the window, and Johnny watches light do what it does best for those last moments, shining on Patrick in similar ways to how it shone on him on the beach, but softer. It doesn’t lose much of the effect.

Patrick watches Johnny stare him down, _has_ to know what’s going through his head, but doesn’t say anything. Johnny steps forward when the sun’s dipped below the horizon, light drawing back from the room, and moves to kiss Patrick, because that’s what usually happens in moments like this.

It lasts for all of three seconds before Patrick separates from him, shaking his head, and Johnny guesses that the on/off switch of their relationship must not be functioning right if he’s feeling things when Patrick isn’t. “Not right now, okay?” Patrick says, somehow managing to sound like he truly doesn’t mean anything hurtful by that. “Not just after the playoffs we’ve had.”

Johnny nods even though he doesn’t understand why Patrick would be screwed up over the playoffs. “Sure,” he murmurs. “Whatever you’d like.”

“I’d like dinner, I think,” Patrick says, brushing by Johnny to leave the room and head back to the kitchen. Johnny realizes he didn’t even have the foresight to pack food for their trip, and finds himself stumbling over his bag after Patrick.

“We’ll need to go into town for supplies at some point,” Patrick admits, “but I have food for now.” He leads Johnny away from the kitchen after consulting the drawn-up map and brings him to the backyard (really, just the other side of the island). There’s a second fridge stuffed in between the patio wall and the grill, and when Patrick opens it there’s food inside. “I asked the timeshare people to do this,” he says, pulling assorted meats and frozen vegetables from inside.

Johnny helps him cook, wonders how Patrick would survive on this island alone when he almost sears the chicken to a crisp on the grill, decides that answer lies heavily on rowing a dinghy full of pizzas between the mainland and the island. Or possibly getting them airlifted to him via helicopter, because it’s flashier.

Dinner goes smoothly enough, Patrick telling jokes that don’t really make him laugh, but make him relax enough to realize that any discomfort about the situation in his room has already been dissolved. They wind down the evening hours with well-meaning chirping over rounds of NHL 12 and Mario Kart, and when they part ways before bed, Patrick even double-checks to make sure Johnny doesn’t need anything, from a glass of water to one of the vases in the living room to liven up his room.

Patrick admits to stealing a painting of George Washington from the second floor and hanging it haphazardly in his own.

But Johnny’s good, doesn’t care much for the bright yellow vase with no flowers in it that Patrick’s pointing to and knows his way around the villa well enough to find the kitchen on his own if he needs a drink. So he moves into his room, closes the door behind him, and stands by the window for a moment, looking out at the stars and reliving the moment that Patrick pulled away from him until he doesn’t feel like it’s important anymore.

/

**Tuesday**

He dreams, but doesn’t remember it by the time he’s angrily squinting upwards, wondering why he didn’t bother to close the blinds before he went to bed, knowing that the sunrise was eventually going to shine right on him.

Closing them now seems like a waste; there’s no alarm clock in his room, but he can hear Patrick moving about to the sounds of some pop song coming from his iPod so it can’t be _too_ early. Getting up seems easier for him than it usually is, almost upsettingly more awake in the offseason than when he really should be on point. He doesn’t beat himself up for that too much though.

Patrick’s moved to the kitchen by the time Johnny has, freshly showered even though Patrick warned him the night before they were probably going to spend the morning in the sand. It turns out to be a ridiculously apt premonition on Johnny’s end though, because Patrick swivels his chair towards him when he walks in and claims that he already misses civilization.

“We weren’t even here this time yesterday morning,” Johnny says, though the argument isn’t really in him. Patrick’s offering to row the dinghy back to the mainland this time, so hitching a free ride back into town for some grocery shopping can’t spell too much trouble for his day.

“I need a fan for my room,” Patrick complains, “because my ceiling fan isn’t cutting it.” Johnny’s is working just fine for him, but maybe he can swing a look at some backup fishing gear at whatever store they end up at. “Don’t forget how small the boat is,” Patrick warns, but Johnny knows how to manage his space.

Rowing to shore takes longer today than yesterday, probably because it’s Patrick’s job now—the lazy streak within him is flaring up strong now that he’s properly woken and, no matter what Johnny tries to convince him, rowing an oar is nothing at all like moving a hockey stick down the ice.

“Water _resists_ this fucking oar,” Patrick explains, even though Johnny doesn’t need it. “Sticks glide. We glide. This is shit.”

“I did it yesterday,” Johnny reminds him, even though Patrick doesn’t need it. “I’ve already pulled my weight.”

Patrick’s sneer is as friendly as he can manage. “And if you load down the boat with twenty pounds of lettuce and fishing lures, you’re pulling the weight back to the island too.”

“That mean you’re rowing back if I’m nineteen pounds or under?” Johnny jokes, and Patrick’s smiling at that, staying that way as they pull up to a communal dock—(“People in Florida are _weird_ ,” Johnny comments)—and tie the boat off.

“Can we buy you a new boat?” Johnny asks, eying the more luxurious and spacious vessels tied up elsewhere, some by houses with private docks. “It’d make trips to the island easier.”

“That’s the only thing it’d be good for,” Patrick frowns. “What good would it do me in Chicago or Buffalo? I’m not going to be staying on the fucking island forever,” and then, “wait, are you embarrassed? It’s not like you to pine for expensive sea travel; I’ve seen the boat you go fucking ice fishing in.”

Johnny shrugs. “We seem out of place.”

“We _are_ out of place,” Patrick confirms. “This is practically Lightning territory.”

“Hockey teams aren’t gangs,” Johnny says, brushing off Patrick and moving past him. Patrick grabs his wrist though, and Johnny almost shakes him off with unnecessary force. “Yeah?”

Patrick bites his tongue for a moment. “I’m glad you came with me,” he says eventually.

It’s not any sort of admission. Johnny keeps that in mind as Patrick urges him on, toward the nearest all-purpose grocery store they can find, wondering what kind of shitty other thoughts Patrick clearly bit back. Of course he would come. Patrick would’ve known from the very first moment that he answered unconventionally to Johnny’s question about his summer plans that his captain would want to scope out what he was doing, where he was.

It’s not a trust thing, he tells himself, and they step into the store in the same thought. Absent-minded, Johnny lets Patrick steer him to the vegetables before realizing he hasn’t really defined his plan for how he’s planning on eating for the week. Patrick, however, seems to have decided that they’re going to eat like kings, or at least in the same caliber, because he’s loading food into their shopping cart, maybe more suddenly keen on the idea of buying a bigger boat than he’d let on, especially if he’s still intent on that fan for his room.

“We’ll be fine,” Patrick promises. “We can both take an oar and row like gondoliers if we need to.”

Johnny has a brief moment of weakness, imagining trailing after Patrick down a side-street in Venice, close to the water, some jokes made about how the thing Johnny would be most interested in is the glass factory on a nearby island, watching Patrick have too much gelato, seeing a young couple almost capsize their gondola, witnessing alternate universes where that young couple is _them_ , wondering if Venice’s canals freeze over as much as the lake named after him back home does.

He breaks it; remembers the island, water, and boat they already have, trails behind Patrick in the grocery store instead, swallows to hold down the nerves in his stomach, swears off Italy for the time being and passes on Patrick’s idea of making pizza that night, much to his disappointment. “Okay,” Patrick shrugs. “We’ll come back for it.”

They’ll make as many trips to the mainland as possible, it seems. That’s fine. If there’s anything Johnny needs after a season spent mostly on the ice, it’s solid ground. To that extent, he passes on fishing gear when they get to it despite Patrick’s urging that he be able to do something fun.

He’s pretty sure it goes without saying that he finds spending time with Patrick to be fun enough. And then they’re checking out, loaded down, untying the dinghy while getting scrutinized (probably more for their shitty knot tying skills than their hockey allegiances) by other people on the dock. They row as Patrick suggested, one oar each, though it doesn’t take Patrick long to sit back down when he realizes he’s rocking the boat, and Johnny’s refused to be a proper gondolier from the beginning.

“You’re no fun,” Patrick complains, so to make it up to him Johnny carries the bulk of the groceries from the dinghy all the way through to the kitchen, Patrick watching him with some sort of reverence spread over his face.

For a while once they get back, they lounge beachside in some sunbeds Patrick found in the room of the house that the blueprint had just labeled as ‘storage.’ It’s a nice day, bright and warm but not burning, and after minutes spent determining whether or not he and Patrick are wearing enough sunscreen, Johnny chills out enough to enjoy it, even though he sees, through the fibers in his shirt, the glance Patrick gives him as he’s removing it, and it briefly sets him on edge.

Patrick dons sunglasses and dozes off around four, leaving Johnny to quietly haul over an umbrella he’d found before and position it so that it keeps Patrick shaded and unlikely to burn. Then he moves inside, makes a few passes through the kitchen that mostly lack purpose, and decides to unpack everything he didn’t before.

Which leaves him lying on his bed with the door open when Patrick comes back inside, throwing him a “Thanks for the umbrella,” as he passes, and then stopping short of his room and backing up, returning to the doorway of Johnny’s. “You look like you’re moping. If you’re not having fun here, you can change your flight home. It’s fine.”

“I’m not moping,” Johnny says, half-rising to his elbows on the bed. “What time is it?”

“Seven,” Patrick says. “You cooking tonight?”

Johnny nods, rearranges himself on the bed to where he’s sitting up and facing Patrick, who moves to stand in front of him. “Sure you’re alright?” Patrick asks, and for the second time in as many days Johnny feels like doing nothing more than dragging Patrick’s mouth to his. But he stops himself this time, nods again, and scoots sideways so that he can stand up next to Patrick.

“I’ll go get dinner started. Go ahead and clean up, or whatever.”

“Gonna shower,” Patrick says. Johnny’s fine with that, so they separate to different spheres of the house.

And because Johnny prides himself on efficiency no matter when, and Patrick feels like being inefficient is the entire point of this vacation, this island, dinner’s almost done by the time Johnny starts wondering what’s taking Patrick so long to shower and goes to check on him.

Patrick never locks any doors, tries to be as open as possible, Johnny’s found. Which is hell when they’re sharing a room on the road and Johnny has to be extra cautious to safeguard his stuff from Sharpy’s pranks, but pretty helpful when it’s just the two of them and Johnny feels like Patrick needs to know to hurry the fuck up.

The shower’s obviously running in the bathroom, and maybe if the spray wasn’t so strong Johnny would’ve realized before he entered that he would’ve been interrupting something he probably didn’t want to interrupt, but as it was the sounds of the shower completely drowned out all other noise Patrick was making, at least until Johnny stepped into the bathroom.

The shower curtain’s drawn across, so Patrick definitely doesn’t see him, let alone hear the door open as Johnny steps inside. But Johnny hears Patrick, panting in ways that showers don’t usually cause people to pant like. Vaguely sees his shadow through the shower curtain, pressed up against the tile of the bathroom wall that borders the shower, hand on his crotch.

Johnny leaves, unwittingly embarrassed for the both of them, maybe because this isn’t the first time this has happened, but more than likely because this is the first time it’s happened that Johnny’s felt hard-done by it, Patrick having the sexual energy to entertain himself in the shower, but not to entertain Johnny at all.

In any case, dinner comes to pass without mention of the incident, and Patrick goes to bed without even knowing it happened. Johnny doesn’t get enough sleep that night, once again dreaming but not remembering it and leaving the blinds open so that he gets rudely interrupted the following morning.

/

**Wednesday**

Johnny rises; the sun also rises. Instead of getting on with things, he reels the blinds all the way up and lays on his bed still, letting the sun’s rays warm his stomach through the window and then boil the gut-wrenching feeling he has inside of him. It works, and by the time he’s gone through the heat of both the sun and the shower, Patrick’s in the kitchen, just like he was yesterday.

He’s doing the maze on a the back of a box of Lucky Charms, but looks up when Johnny strides in. “Hey, you okay?” Patrick asks, but not in any tone that indicates he’s figured out neither that Johnny witnessed him in the shower nor that Johnny seems to be struck by some sort of wordless desire for him.

It takes him a moment to answer, largely because he doesn’t want to. But he gets over himself, passes off his inattention as leftover drowsiness, and when Patrick asks again and looks concerned—which, good—Johnny says, “Absolutely.” And that’s that, even though it probably shouldn’t be. Patrick grins though, and looks so content that Johnny can’t help but nod back at him.

“I’m gonna go in the water today,” Patrick says, pushing the box of Lucky Charms over to Johnny when he sits across from him with a bowl. The maze on the back is still unfinished, so Johnny sends it back to Patrick when he’s done pilfering only the actual cereal from the box, leaving the marshmallows for those more inclined to sugar rushes.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Johnny agrees. He doesn’t make any promises to go in with Patrick, but he also doesn’t get asked if he’s going to. It probably goes unsaid that he would, which means he should go in, but he also feels like he’s experienced Patrick’s contact with water well enough for the week. He goes outside with Patrick and helps him rub sunscreen into the bits of his back he can’t reach anyway, and lets Patrick get those spots for him too.

“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Patrick calls from the water after Johnny’s hesitation to join him extends beyond five minutes. “Are you coming in or not?”

“Not,” Johnny calls out, making the decision all of a sudden. But just as suddenly, before he can turn on the sand and retreat back into the villa, Patrick’s stomping his way out of the water and pulling him in.

Johnny struggles in the water for a moment, gets his bearings, splutters the salt out of his mouth, and turns on Patrick. “It’s always you dragging me back in, isn’t it?” He didn’t mean for the metaphor to get literal; Patrick made it go both ways.

“What?” Patrick asks, but Johnny’s already gripping handfuls of the sandbank in his palms and righting himself back onto land. Patrick doesn’t dare follow him back inside. The best he can do is call out a confused “I’m sorry, Tazer!” after Johnny, which he tries not to care about.

He acts like he’s closed to the Earth until further notice when Patrick finally tires of treading water and comes back inside. Patrick tries to talk to him, but catches on pretty quickly that Johnny’s going to want to initiate conversation from this point on and retreats to his room, leaving Johnny sprawled out on the couch in the living room, not-watching _The Big Sleep_.

Crime noir’s not really his thing.

Just before dinner, Johnny gets it in his head that it’s better to show your hand than hide it, get cards and thoughts out on the table instead of clutching them to his chest. He doesn’t have time for that. This is the offseason, and Patrick won’t ruin it for him by dragging him to an island and then denying him his feelings when he could’ve just left him alone and let Johnny think they were okay, for the summer at least.

He pulls Patrick from his room with a “Let’s talk?” and notes the way that Patrick practically jumps after him, shadowing him through to the living room.

“What’s up?” Patrick asks, then backtracks. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Okay,” Johnny says. “Why won’t you be with me? This is the most private place you could’ve fucking brought me. What was the point of it?”

Patrick looks thoroughly caught off guard by the question for several moments, thoughts trying to sort themselves out in his head. “What are you talking about? I brought you because I thought you could use a little fun in your life.”

Johnny levels his stare at Patrick. “We were—” he starts, and thinks better of it. “Why didn’t you let me kiss you on Monday? You certainly weren’t complaining when I was doing that during the season.”

“I told you, man,” Patrick frowns. “I wasn’t feeling it.”

“I heard you masturbating in the shower last night,” Johnny says, as if that would be the one thing that would get Patrick to realize that he still wanted Johnny’s affection.

“Sorry about that?” Patrick says, not sure why it’s being brought up. Definitely not the first time it had happened. If Johnny’s worked up over it, it’s either out of place or a projection from some other issue.

“Why didn’t you ask me to help?”

Patrick actually laughs, but calmly. He smiles like Johnny’s just asked the most adorable question in the world, and he needs a moment to bask in it before he can answer. “I didn’t think of asking you.”

And that does it for Johnny. He leans forward and kisses Patrick again, not stopping to ease him into it but instead going straight for the roughness of all their usual make-outs. And for a few glorious moments, Patrick definitely kisses back, fights Johnny for it as if it’s instinct and second-nature to him. But then he pulls back, swallows hard, looks Johnny in the eyes not with contempt but fear and recognition instead, and flees outside.

Johnny almost doesn’t follow him, but it’s not in his gut to avoid the confrontation. When he gets outside, Patrick’s kneeling on the beach over something that Johnny can’t quite make out until he rounds himself on Patrick more. He realizes it’s a figure, then realizes it’s a girl, that she’s not moving, and that Patrick’s mouth is cupped over hers and his hands are pumping down on her chest.

She coughs up water eventually, and Patrick leans back on his knees, breathing with relief. He turns to Johnny, yanks his head in her direction, and asks him to call an ambulance, see if they can get a boat to take her to shore. The girl, suddenly animate, grasps Patrick’s wrist. “Please no,” she utters, and her voice reminds Johnny of siren songs sung by the vengeful spirits of those women who have previously drowned. “Do you have any way of taking me to shore yourself?”

“What’s going on?” Johnny calls, moving closer down to the water. The girl launches into a story that sounds rehearsed, like she made sure to fit all of the pieces together as she was floating on the waves, waiting to be carried somewhere.

Her name is Emi, she says, and she leapt from her fiancé's boat when she realized that he had unsavory ties to the mob. She doesn’t want to stay with him, knowing that, can’t bear the implications of blood on her husband’s hands. Patrick nods like he knows exactly what not wanting to stay with someone feels like. Johnny feels tremendously betrayed.

Emi doesn’t want to go to the hospital, just needs to make it to mainland so she can get to Miami and return to Chicago, her home. Patrick looks like he’s about to suggest that she stay with them until they leave, but then realizes that he and Johnny aren’t returning to Chicago after this. She clearly doesn’t know who they are, won’t entreat on them for the company.

“I’ll take you in the dinghy,” Patrick says, looking at Johnny the entire time he speaks. “It’s only big enough for the two of us, though. Can you hold down the fort, Johnny?”

“Yeah,” Johnny mumbles. “That’s fine.”

It’s not fine. Patrick knows it, but he nods at Johnny. “Okay,” he says, turns to Emi. “You sure you don’t want medical treatment.”

“My fiancé will come looking for me, I’m sure,” she says. “The sooner I return to Chicago, the sooner I disappear from his life.”

Johnny doesn’t want to tell her that it might be hard for her to disappear from the view of a mob-associated criminal, so he bites his tongue. He helps Patrick bring the dinghy around from where it’s been docked so that Emi can preserve her strength. They load in, Johnny still on the shore, Patrick staring at him hard as if this whole event is some kind of omen for how they would turn out.

Johnny also bites his tongue on saying that Emi probably would’ve drowned on the shoreline of their beach if Johnny hadn’t made Patrick flee the villa.

He watches them sail out, Patrick rowing harder than he did either time before, Emi gripping the sides of the dinghy like she doesn’t know what to do with herself. Patrick gives him a wave before they get out of sight and that, at least, feels some sort of comforting.

Patrick doesn’t come back that night, no matter how late Johnny stays up waiting for him to. It makes sense, he thinks, because why would he try and row the dinghy back in the middle of the night with only one flashlight to guide his way? But it’s still unsettling, despite Patrick’s departing wave. It makes Johnny feel like he’s fucked this up well worse than he’s ever fucked up anything before, even when he was concussed.

He plays the image of Patrick rowing away in the dinghy—Emi clutching its sides unsteadily as if she really was a siren, unable to figure out how land, how anything but the sea, worked—over and over again in his head, hoping to make it not matter, just as he did when Patrick pulled away from him after the first kiss.

They’re both the same, he realizes; they’re exactly the same. He feels ungrounded suddenly, like the world’s centrifugal forces start spinning harder and faster than their centripetal opposites, that which was latching him down becoming loose in the presence of that which would pull him up. He sleeps unsteadily that night; gravity on the ground had always seemed different from gravity on the ice, but with Patrick gone he’s starting to feel like he’s whirling free of the mothership, about to fly off into space, totally fucked.

/

**Thursday**

Johnny doesn’t expect Patrick to be back when he wakes up, once again the victim of too-little sleep and his own disinterest in bringing his blinds down, continuing to let the sun wash over him to wake him up. It’s obscure, this peace he has with waking up when he’s on the island, so very different from what he’d categorize as real life. But everything of the last three days has kind of seemed that way, truthfully.

So Patrick’s not back, and Johnny’s not surprised, until he stumbles into the house around noon, when Johnny’s making food. He snatches the sandwich Johnny makes for himself, taking bites from it while meeting Johnny’s stare dead-on, unaffected by the insecurity on his face.

“Got proposed to last night,” Patrick laughs easily between bites of the sandwich.

“What did you say?” Johnny asks, because _he_ doesn’t know what to say to that. “Wait, who by?”

“Emi,” Patrick says, smiling. “It was just a joke, obviously. I told her we were from Chicago too but that I lived in Buffalo sometimes. She thought of me as a way to leave Chicago without leaving it. But as I said, it was a joke. You’re the only one for me, anyway.”

Johnny goes rigid as Patrick clasps him on the back a few times, wondering if Patrick’s somehow hung-over. Wonders when he got drunk in the first place; wonders if he _is_ drunk, or if that comment is meant as payback for all of yesterday, because Patrick knew it’d set him on edge. “What?” he asks, but Patrick waves it off.

“Great sandwich,” he says. “I’m gonna shower now. Beachside later?”

Johnny doesn’t know what’s going on. “I think I’ll stay inside today.”

“That’s fine,” Patrick says. “Then so will I.”

“You don’t need to,” Johnny says quickly. “Go shower. I’m going to make myself another sandwich.”

“Sounds good,” Patrick says, moves away from the kitchen.

Johnny makes himself a third coffee instead of another sandwich and stands in the kitchen to drink it, staring at the ocean through the glass doors. His feet itch, not physically but psychologically, and at first he thinks he wants to get back on the ice already, but he stamps around the kitchen and feels better and realizes he just wants to _walk_ somewhere.

It’s probably not the coffee, he reasons, and pours himself a fourth instead of doing something about the restlessness in his legs. But then he’s halfway through drinking it and still staring out at sea when he realizes that he can hear silence where the distant noise of Patrick’s shower running had been going on in the background. And then there are footsteps not far off, Patrick thumping around on carpeting because he has no tactical edge, and Johnny almost throws his coffee mug down on the kitchen table and yanks open the glass door, taking off into the sand.

It’s good for a minute until his body kills off the adrenaline of the split-second decision to avoid Patrick and remembers how difficult it is to actually run in sand, but he left his shoes indoors and doesn’t want to drag his feet through the grass near the villa. He doesn’t want to go near the villa at all.

There’s something to be said about the plan, in that it might’ve been a good one if the island wasn’t so tiny, taken up mostly by the villa and just a circle of beach sand acting as a reverse moat. As it is, there’s not much of anywhere he could hide from Patrick if he went looking for him, so he’s stuck hoping that Patrick doesn’t go looking for him as he slows down to a casual stroll through the sand, kicking up every few steps to watch grains get unearthed in front of him.

“Hey,” Patrick’s voice calls, and for a moment Johnny can’t pinpoint exactly where it came from even though he glances at the villa. But then he looks up instead, and sees Patrick waving at him from a balcony patio Johnny hadn’t even realized was there. He hasn’t even gone to the second floor of the villa at all. Clearly, a mistake.

Patrick’s only got a towel wrapped around him, which makes Johnny swallow his breath not because it brings dangerous urges to the table (it does), but because it means that Patrick had gone through to the kitchen in only a towel to try and talk to Johnny before he’d bolted. It says too many things, but Johnny doesn’t understand any of them.

“Hey,” he calls back tentatively, figuring that ignoring Patrick wouldn’t do him much good with nowhere to go. He keeps walking around though, forcing Patrick to move along the railing of the balcony to keep him in sight. Unfortunately, it seems that the patio extends all the way around the top of the villa with no walls to block him from Patrick’s view.

“I thought you were staying inside today.”

“Didn’t have it in me,” Johnny calls back, almost tempted to walk near to the balcony so that he didn’t have to raise his voice. He’s pretty sure it’s all lost on the sea wind, but he hates the thought that someone on one of the picnic islands nearby might understand things not lost in translation. Patrick doesn’t seem bothered by the distance; from what Johnny can make out of his face, he looks almost pleased to be watching him from afar.

“You want me to join you on your walk?”

“Put some clothes on,” Johnny says, hoping that Patrick catches that it’s more of a kind request than a promise that he can join him on his walk if he gets dressed.

“No one can see me!” Patrick laughs, dropping the towel. Johnny averts his eyes and seriously reconsiders his life choices.

“Pat, come on,” Johnny huffs. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“In front of you?” Patrick challenges. “Come inside and talk to me, loser. Stop pouting. I’ll put pants on.”

“You fucking better. I’ll come in; give me a minute. Go get dressed.”

Patrick salutes him and leaves the balcony without his towel. Johnny experiences only minor hesitation to stare at his ass as he goes, and then kicks the sand furiously for a moment afterward, letting his temper settle as the sand does.

“What’re you so strung up about?” Patrick asks lightheartedly as he moves into the living room minutes later, deciding to lounge next to Johnny on the couch even though he was making a concerted effort to take up as much room as possible and force Patrick into an armchair.

“Why are you so loose today?” Johnny counters. “You were pissed yesterday.”

“I wasn’t pissed,” Patrick says, and both of them know it’s one of those things they could argue about forever without getting anywhere so they drop it. He pulls himself into a better reclining position, holding onto Johnny’s arm for support as he rights himself on the couch and ignoring how Johnny momentarily tries to twist out of his touch. “Why do you wanna be with me?”

Johnny swallows. That’s a loaded question with what he feels is no real right answer; there’s nothing he could say to that which wouldn’t be either a complete lie or a complete mess of emotional imbalance. Patrick seems content to let him think about it for a moment, searching for any avenue that wouldn’t fuck everything up, but Johnny doesn’t go that route. “I love you?”

“Is that a question?” Patrick asks. And of course it’s not; it never really has been. Johnny shakes his head. The same recognition that came over Patrick yesterday after Johnny kissed him spreads back over his face again, and he doesn’t seem like he’s going to run this time but still looks on edge about it. “Okay,” he says, probably shoving the unease to one side of his brain and thinking with the other.

He pulls Johnny toward him and kisses him, initiates it this time as if that would make everything better, as if Johnny doesn’t get confused by everything about it; like how it tastes different from the previous kisses they had that Patrick had initiated during the season, but in a bad way. The kiss seems pitiful: not that Patrick isn’t trying, but that he’s trying too hard to convey some false emotional equivalence on par with how Johnny feels about him.

It’s a kiss that says that Patrick’s not sure if he loves Johnny back, and that’s what makes him break it off, turning more tables on Patrick than he ever thought possible, rushing to his feet and making his way outside again, desperate for air.

Outside, there’s no half-drowned siren waiting for him this time. But there is a bottle with a message in it, an SOS that Johnny feels like he should read, maybe so that he can learn to send one out himself. The scrawl on the paper is mostly a mess, but he makes it out well enough to know that it’s written by someone pining for the love of their life, who fell off their boat.

Johnny doesn’t know if that proves or disproves his theory that Emi is a siren, but he pushes it back because he knows that she’s safe on the mainland regardless. The author of the message spends a few lines spewing lyrics from their favorite love song, about a guy who can’t figure out if the love of his life loves him back or not.

Given what little he learned about Emi during her brief stay on the island, Johnny’s gonna have to go out on a limb and say she probably doesn’t. Not that he blames her, he guesses. The mob is dirty business. The message ends with some sort of mystical revelation that must’ve come to the author in a dream or something, because it’s been traced over a few times until it looks properly bold amongst the other words: _unfortunately, the line between unrequited and unconditional is less clear than it seems._

And Johnny gets that, he thinks. Patrick comes outside, kneels next to him on the shore, grabs one wrist and grabs the message in his other hand, scanning it. He gets it too, or at least gets that the message is about Emi. When he finishes reading it, Johnny sees him read the last line a couple of times.

He grabs Johnny’s wrist tighter, puts the message down in the sand. “That’s bullshit,” he says, but he’s not looking at Johnny when he says it. And that’s that, Johnny thinks. That’s the end of the story. But he’s misunderstood the words.

The universe doesn’t suddenly conspire to tell him that. It isn’t time.

/

**Friday**

He’s awake at four, not because of the unrisen sun but because of the dream he has and wants to leave behind. If train one leaves Chicago at 20:28 travelling six hundred thousand feet per hour and train two leaves Winnipeg at 16:29 travelling twenty-eight hundred meters a minute, what time will they subvert their intended paths of travel to Buffalo and drive down south to fix him in their crosshairs and run him over?

The answer is never. He’s on an island, and trains don’t work like that. His dream didn’t seem to care. As a result, he doesn’t care for its metaphor. Who says it’s supposed to mean that both the homes in his life eventually make peace with Kaner’s? His brain, apparently, but he’s not going to listen to it.

That serves his purpose well, because his brain also tells him not to commandeer the dinghy at four in the morning, intent on rowing to shore and pulling what would probably be referred to as “a Patrick.” That is: finding the nearest 24-hour store, buying alcohol, and sitting on the dock with no real other purpose in mind. He grips the oars tightly and clenches the flashlight between his teeth as he rows; in the darkness, if there were ever a time for Emi’s siren song to strike and bring him to the depths, it would be now.

No supernatural force pulls him from the dinghy; it doesn’t start raining suddenly; no ostensibly arcane magic makes the stars fall from the sky and land in his boat and weigh him down until Hades (or, maybe more fittingly, Poseidon) reaches up from underneath him and brings him into the Underworld fold in the same manner as Persephone.

Nothing happens. He gets to shore, knots the boat onto the dock, pulls his phone out to locate the nearest Walmart, or whatever. The only other people there are fishermen which, hey, works for Johnny. He swings around the store to the sporting goods and picks up back up fishing gear, reasoning with himself that it’s not a waste because he had been planning on doing this since Tuesday, and it’s always important for a fisherman to get accustomed to using different kinds of poles.

He keeps that reasoning up until he wearily picks up his preferred brand after staring at too many for too long. It doesn’t matter; he has the money to spend. He only buys one case of beer to make up for it.

The dock is boring this early in the morning. He could follow suit of the others from the store and go fishing, but he doesn’t want to yet. Dawn breaks onto the dock and Johnny feels content to just lie in it for a while, nursing one beer instead of chugging them as he’d intended.

His head’s a mess. He doesn’t know how to get it sorted out, but this seems to work for now. He can complicate his thoughts about Patrick again later. For now, he’s content to lounge on the dock and watch the dinghy rock amongst the waves, wondering if maybe the best thing to do would be to leave. Patrick would be stranded on the island for a while, until he could get someone to bring a boat around to him. It’d be mean. It’d mess up their hockey compatibility. He’s not willing to do that to the team.

A young couple probably living off their parents’s money comes to the dock around ten and makes idle chitchat with him when he offers to help them load their supplies into their boat before they go picnicking. He doesn’t know what any two people could need so much wine for. He doesn’t ask, they don’t tell him.

Strangers aside, his time on the shore is lonesome. He starts missing the island (or something on the island; his thought doesn’t go further than that) around midday, when the sun’s overhead but not quite where the moon was when he rowed to shore that morning. He feels more awake now, and his teeth don’t get sore from having to hold a flashlight in his mouth on the way back.

Patrick turns his head and meets Johnny with a curious look when he trudges back into the villa, not hesitating to hold up his beer and gear as an explanation, but doesn’t pause _Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing_. Apparently the only movies the television at the villa plays pre-date them by thirty years. Johnny’s going to make his way to his room, but Patrick stretches out a hand to grab him as he goes past, and Johnny absolutely extends his arm in return and lets himself be pulled to the couch before he realizes he didn’t anticipate this.

He stays silent for a moment, letting Patrick push up against him and curling his arm around his waist without really meaning to. “You know the guy—” he starts, but Patrick covers his mouth with a hand. “Okay,” he shrugs, and settles in to watch the movie, even though there’s only twenty minutes left on it.

The butterfly crosses the screen and the movie ends, and Johnny’s about to say something again but Patrick’s already pressing his mouth to his. It’s not the kiss it was yesterday. Johnny wonders if Patrick also woke at four; also suffered from metaphor dreams but decided to think about them instead of fleeing to the mainland as Johnny had. They could’ve fled together, he thinks, laughing to himself, except Patrick’s still kissing him.

He pulls off. Most of him is still uneasy, even though Patrick’s giving him a stare that tells him everything he needs to know about how much thought he’s put into this second kiss. It’s not jumping the gun or missing the point or anything but the results of the impetuous rush of two dream trains coming at him from different directions.

Fuck. He gets up. Patrick lets him. “Let me take you to dinner,” he says as Johnny walks from the living room to the kitchen. But it doesn’t say _now_ , it says _when you’re ready_. Johnny wants to know why he’s suddenly the one who isn’t ready. He grabs his fishing gear and rounds to the dinghy outside, untying it and pushing into the water, staying close to the shore of the island.

He’s not out there to catch fish, really, and he catches Patrick’s stares from the upper balcony without even turning around to see them. They’re hot on his back like the sun is hot on his chest. In the middle of the day, he doesn’t gaze down into the depths of the ocean and see nothingness like he did in the morning. He doesn’t wonder if the bottom of it leads to the Underworld. He does wonder if it’s possible for the swirl of his thoughts to cause a whirlpool to form under him.

Nature’s forces are obliterating; individuals don’t survive their power alone. When a choppy wave comes and unsteadies the boat, he clings to the sides and almost rows back in to safety.

/

**Saturday**

He doesn’t remember closing the blinds in his room, which means Patrick did it while he was away the previous morning and he didn’t notice at all. For once this week, he wakes when he’s ready to. Various deprivations of sleep finally catch up to him, and he gets into the kitchen closer to noon than he would’ve wished for, optimally.

At first he’s so caught up between choosing whether to stick to breakfast cereal or actually take the time to make himself a proper lunch that he doesn’t notice Patrick at the kitchen table, laptop in front of him. That’s not all that’s there, and when Johnny turns around to finally face him he realizes that Patrick must’ve copied his ‘take the dinghy out in the early morning’ idea, because there’s craft paper and about fifteen different paper animals strewn across the table.

“I didn’t know you knew origami,” Johnny says, because asking why Patrick seems to have reverted to some sort of elementary arts-and-crafts state of mind comes across as too rude inside his head.

Patrick spins his laptop to face Johnny, and he can’t make out the words from so far away, but he gathers from the pictures on the screen that Patrick _doesn’t_ know origami, he’s just following precise instructions from the internet. That doesn’t answer the _why_ , but Johnny’s more interested in food than that. This is Patrick’s vacation, he can do what he likes, and maybe origami would turn out to be a good hand-eye coordination exercise when training camp starts up again.

“Cranes are harder than I expected,” Patrick says when Johnny pulls bread from the cabinet for a sandwich. “I can’t get the wings right. So I’m practicing with penguins for now. You want a go?”

“Making a sandwich. Maybe later,” he offers, even though he’s not really interested in the slightest. Maybe he’ll go fishing again today. He thinks about packing for his flight home tomorrow and then stops himself. Food first, focus.

“Make me one too?” Patrick asks, and sure, Johnny can do that. “Thanks,” Patrick says, even though Johnny’s only indication he’s going to make Pat the sandwich is pulling too many slices from the loaf.

“What else are you planning on doing today?” Johnny asks after a few moments, when he’s stolen two glances towards the table and sees Patrick working on his fourth penguin.

“Dunno,” Patrick says casually, like he’s not concerned at all that this is his last day with Johnny on the island. “Probably just this? All day.”

“Oh.” He tries not to sound too dejected because it’s his own damn fault. Patrick doesn’t say anything. When Johnny’s done making sandwiches and bringing them over to the table, there are more than penguins on the table. Patrick’s wearing a paper crown. There’s another sitting out in the spot at the table across from him, clearly where Patrick intends for Johnny to sit.

“Wear it,” Patrick encourages. Johnny tries to get across that his look of confusion is asking Patrick if this is his punishment for being weird all week, but Patrick either doesn’t catch on or doesn’t care. He takes his sandwich from the plate and bites into it, staring at the paper crown next to Johnny.

And, fine—okay. Johnny takes one bite of his sandwich before he gives in and puts the crown on, smiling when Patrick smiles and discovering his sandwich somehow tastes better with crafted tissue paper adorning his head. It’s all very pre-school, but honestly he doesn’t have any complaints about it.

He gets halfway through his sandwich, watching Patrick eat his and grinning, before he speaks up. “I thought you were working on penguins to learn how to make paper cranes?”

“Paper cranes, paper crowns,” Patrick waves his hand, “what’s the difference?”

Johnny laughs and can’t help himself but to reach for unused paper and Patrick’s laptop, opening the page for the crane even though Patrick’s giving him the world’s most intrigued glance and reminding him that he hasn’t finished his sandwich. “Is this going to be a competition now?” Patrick asks, already folding his square into a kite base.

They both manage to make cranes, though neither of them are particularly impressive—Johnny’s wings are way too small; Patrick seems unable to get his tail to point backwards without tearing the paper at the neck of the crane. Cue laughter at their failures, then they try again.

Johnny’s Venetian fantasy from Tuesday comes flooding back over him, but now they’re not just stuck in one corner of the world. He bears his imagination and sees them walking next to rice paddies in Korea on their way down to the Outback, souvenir safari hats adorned in place of their paper crowns; takes them up and down the Alps again before crossing the Sahara and Serengeti in the same day, feet never seeming to actually touch the ground; he sees every stadium they’ve ever played hockey in, and then sees them in his own house back in Winnipeg. Both of their families are there. Everyone’s laughing.

He’s laughing out loud too by the time he’s done, a crane no better than his last falling apart in his hands. But he doesn’t care, and Patrick doesn’t ask. He seems to get it, if the grin on his face is any indication. “This is so easy,” Johnny says, and for a moment he’s worried Patrick’s going to think he’s talking about the damn paper cranes. But of course he’s not. Patrick nods.

“You wanna go to dinner tonight?” He asks.

Johnny refuses to let his voice catch in his throat. “I wanna do _everything_ ,” he says, grinning. Patrick’s grinning too.

In the span of what feels like a single breath moving through his lungs, the day passes. They have dinner on the shore, somewhere nice that Johnny begs to pay for and wins after less argument than he would’ve expected. There’s ice cream on the docks and it’s infinitely better than Venetian gelato could ever be, at least here and now. He feels like he’s living part of a destiny he couldn’t leave behind even if he wished; almost falls over laughing that a trail of breadcrumbs has led them to Florida of all places. He thinks about packing that night and _doesn’t_ , triumphantly. They both sleep in Patrick’s bed.

Under the covers, Patrick squeezes his hand and Johnny releases his breath.

/

**Sunday**

“I think,” Johnny starts and pauses, all finality taken out of his voice. “I think I’ll stay another week.” He doesn’t know why he has to say it out loud. He already didn’t pack; he already cancelled his flight to Winnipeg. Patrick already knows he’s staying. But he has to get the words out.

“Cool,” Patrick says, looking lazily at him from a sunbed stretched out on the patio. “I figured as much, but thanks for the heads-up.”

Johnny’s biting back a retort when the wind picks up drastically and Patrick’s face lights up before he rushes inside. He bought kites from the craft store yesterday and they’re all strung up and ready to go. All he’s been waiting for is the wind, and here it comes. Their paper crowns are inside too, but they’ll get blown away if they bring them out now.

Patrick steps back into the sunlight and breathes it in, handing a kite reel to Johnny before running across the sand and getting his own into the air. Johnny almost doesn’t follow him, sure that the wind will die back down any moment, but it seems to blow faster and faster at his back until he stumbles forward to the sand and launches his kite into the air.

The wind levels out from there, coming in bursts that keep their kites afloat when needed, but it doesn’t pull at their reels and force them to chase down the beach after them. Neither of them tires out before the wind does, kites finally dropping back down into their arms. Patrick pulls him inside and up to the balcony, storing their kites first.

It takes five minutes of reassuring Johnny that there’s definitely no one can see them on the balcony before they agree to trade lazy blowjobs in the sun, lounging on the sunbeds that have always been up there, permanent fixtures of the villa that Johnny’s coming to appreciate.

When they’re done, they go back down. Patrick wants to run along the beach, tirelessly. They grab their paper crowns and put them on before they go outside just because they can, maybe the haze of the day and their actions sticking to them and letting them take joy in even the smallest things.

Johnny reads a book on a sunbed. Patrick grips his crown in one hand while watching birds travel overhead, to and from the mainland before coming back to Johnny and refusing to settle down, bringing his craft supplies outside and continuing the quest for the proper origami crane.

Minutes pass. The wind picks up again. Both of their paper crowns get dislodged in a sudden breeze, carried up into the sky and seeming to glisten against the sun’s rays even though they have no reflective surfaces. Every single one of Patrick’s origami efforts gets carried south, to where they’ll eventually cross the Tropic of Cancer before dropping down into the water, and they sparkle all the way until they’re out of Johnny’s eyesight.

The sight of them shimmering like that makes him think of hockey, though he’s not sure why. Something about the ice and reflections and the peace of it all.

Hockey—and Johnny’s really pleased with this metaphor he’s thinking of, as he sits near to Patrick and watches a plane go overhead and feeling grateful that he’s not tied to that, that he’s here instead—hockey is kind of like one of those snowglobes that his mom likes so much, that he ends up getting her for Christmas every other year. Snowglobes are like isolated mini-worlds of their own design; hockey feels the same way, like everything he needs in life is drawn into this ball that he occupies completely.

Patrick’s there, in his snowglobe, though Johnny doesn’t know what part of it he is—the other people, the snow itself, the decorative background houses are all viable options for Patrick’s place, but none of them seem fitting enough for him.

Patrick jumps up and down on the beach a few feet from him, and Johnny thinks fondly of the idea that, if Patrick had his own hockey snowglobe, it would maybe look like a disco ball instead. Buzzing with that kind of energy. Patrick bounces light off his body as if the sun is drawn to him; is probably the very glass surface of his obscure disco-snowglobe mix, while Johnny occupies his from inside.

And, Johnny thinks, if Patrick’s the glass encompassing _his_ glass ball snowglobe as well, then hell, let him shine.

**Author's Note:**

> The times the trains leave in Johnny's dream on Friday conform to 1988 (20:28) and 04/29 (16:29), his birthday. Who let me do this why did no one stop me.


End file.
